Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 2, 1851-1891)

The first volume of Hershel Parkers definitive biography of Herman Melvillea finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prizeclosed on a mid-November day in 1851. In the dining room of the Little Red Inn in Lenox Massachusetts Melville had just presented an inscribed copy of his new novel Moby-Dick to his intimate friend Nathaniel Hawthorne the man to whom the work was dedicated. "Take it all in all " Parker concluded "this was the happiest day of Melvilles life." Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 2 1851-1891 chronicles Melvilles life in rich detail from this ecstatic moment to his death in obscurity forty years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness) the savage reviews he received for his next book Pierre and his inability to have the novel The Isle of the Crossnow lostpublished at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno " and produced a final novel The Confidence Man a mordant satire of American optimism. Over his last three decades while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet crafting the centennial epic Clarel in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne and the masterful story "Billy Budd " originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem. Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries newly discovered newspaper articles and marginalia from books that Melville owned Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melvilles life episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The concluding volume of Herman Melville: A Biography confirms Hershel Parkers position as the worlds leading Melville scholar demonstrating his unrivaled biographical literary and historical imagination and providing a rich new portrait of a greatand profoundly Americanartist.